Poetry: Russian Absurdism and Flemish Poetry

Eugene Ostashevsky and Matvei Yankelevich host a reading for OBERIU, an anthology of Russian Absurdism; Kurt Brown and Laure-Anne Boselaar read translations of Flemish poet Herman De Coninck.

"OBERIU, sometimes called Russia's last avant-garde, is one of the most intriguing--and little known--movements of the years before World War II. The absurdist poets at its center--Alexander Vvedensky, Daniil Kharms, and Nikolai Zabolotsky--belonged to the first generation of writers to come of age after the October Revolution and hence stand apart from their Futurist predecessors. Less interested in coining neologisms than in destroying `the protocols of semantic coherence and linguistic realism,' these poets have produced a series of inventive, free-wheeling, and often hilarious poetic texts in a variety of forms and genres. This anthology, the first large-scale English translation of OBERIU poetry, has been superbly edited and translated by the Russo-American poet Eugene Ostashevsky and his colleagues. In avant-garde annals, this is a milestone." --Marjorie Perloff

"The OBERIU writers are a revelation, an aspect of Russian modernism in the early Soviet period that has been largely invisible to readers in English, and these translations are brilliant, as nervy and funny and demotic as if the work were written in an inspired English in the first place." --Robert Hass

Herman de Coninck, Flander's leading poet, was born in Belgium in 1944 and died in Lisbon in 1997. For 13 years he worked as a journalist, then founded and edited the New World Magazine which quickly became the most important and respected Dutch literary review. He is the author of seven highly acclaimed and prize winning books of poetry, and also published two books of critical essays. His poems have been translated in Polish, Chinese, Bulgarian, and
German.

Laure-Anne Bosselaar is the author of The Hour Between Dog and Wolf and of Small Gods of Grief, winner of the Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry for 2001. Her third book, A New Hunger, has just come out from Ausable Press. Her fourth anthology Never Before: Poems About First Experiences was published by Four Way Books. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and at the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program of Pine Manor College.

Kurt Brown is founding director of the Aspen Writers' Conference, and founding director of Writers' Conferences & Centers (a national association of directors).His poems have appeared in many literary periodicals, and he is the editor of several anthologies including Blues for Bill, for the late William Matthews, from University of Akron Press and his newest (with Harold Schechter), Conversation Pieces: Poems that Talk to Other Poems from Alfred A. Knopf, Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series. He is the author of six chapbooks and five full-length collections of poetry, including Return of the Prodigals, More Things in Heaven and Earth, Fables from the Ark, and two new collections, Future Ship and From Here, due out in 2007 and 2008 respectively from Red Hen Press. A collection of the poems of Flemish poet Herman de Coninck entitled The Plural of Happiness, which he and his wife translated, was just released in the
Field Translation Series.